The Last Day

THREE

Las Vegas, Nevada

The hotel shuttle deposited Ward McCarty at the airport to catch his flight home after three days of overfilled tote bags, crowded sales booths, and insincere smiles. He hated trade shows but had to attend them in order to keep up with new suppliers, new materials, gimmicks, manufacturers, competition.

After standing in a long line, Ward showed his North Carolina license and ticket to a bored female guard, slipped off his shoes, belt, cell phone, and watch, and put them all in a plastic tray. He took the computer out of the briefcase and placed it, his briefcase, and his carry- on on the conveyor belt, watching them vanish into the X-ray machine. He felt naked in his sock feet and he hated holding his khakis up with one hand so the cuffs didn't drag.

At the other end of the conveyor belt, a burly guard with a buzz cut opened his briefcase. Ward glanced over to see an elderly woman standing calmly while a guard ran a wand up and down over her stooped body. Satisfied, Ward's guard lifted out a bubble-lined envelope from the briefcase and slipped out a small blue die-cast race car. As he studied the toy, his eyes grew comically larger. He looked at Ward as if asking permission.

Ward smiled. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Man.” The guard whistled. “Richard Petty's Road Runner die- cast in near mint. You are one lucky devil. That was a one- year deal, that car.” He looked at the underside. “It's not marked on the bottom.”

“It's a prototype. It was never produced. One of a kind.”

“One of a kind?” The guard placed it back into the envelope with care. “What's it worth?”

“No idea. It's been in my family since before I was born,” Ward said.

“Have a good day, sir,” the guard told him, as he put the padded envelope into Ward's briefcase beside his computer and closed it.

Ward reached his assigned concourse through a maze of temporary signs, Sheetrock dust, scaffolding, plastic sheeting, and constructive pandemonium, accented by the shrill buzzing of power drills and electric saws. At Ward's insistence, the travel agent had booked his and his uncle's flights so the two business owners wouldn't be on the same plane. Ward had spent a few hours of his time in Vegas with Mark and his second wife while they were being entertained by manufacturers’ reps, only slightly more pleasant than visiting the dentist.

At his gate Ward spent the time waiting for his flight staring at an open novel he'd bought before leaving Charlotte, trying to absorb the words and make sense of the plot. When he traveled with paperback novels, he always tore out the chapters as he finished them and threw the pages away, which served to both mark his place and make his load lighter. After he finished the chapter he was working on, he ripped the pages out and put them on the seat beside him, then slowly realized

that he had no idea what had happened in the discarded chapter.

Ward was bothered by the lack of clocks at the gate, which meant that passengers had to have watches or cell phones in order to know how long they had until their planes boarded. Of all of the things Ward didn't like about Las Vegas-and there was nothing he did like-he most disliked the city's denial that time passed there. Sitting in a leather chair with his carry- on bag and briefcase at his feet, he looked out through the windows at the Strip-easy to spot from the monstrous black glass pyramid and the giant sphinx with its lion ass backed right up to it.

Ward called his wife on his cell phone to explain the delay, but got their home answering machine. He had spoken to Natasha only once in the past few days, when he'd arrived at the airport for the memorabilia- suppliers’ trade show. Of the six or seven times he'd called since, he'd left short messages. He wasn't alarmed, because Natasha often turned the phones’ ringers off, or ignored them. She carried a cell phone but rarely turned it on unless she needed to answer her emergency beeper.

Sudden jazzy notes of youthful laughter froze Ward and he turned slowly to see not the young boy he expected to see but a young girl of eight or so playing tag with a smaller child. He exhaled loudly and looked down at his paperback, feeling the sudden tears running down his cheeks. Several times each day for the past year, something brought Barney into his mind, and, with that trigger, a choking gloom descended over him like a wet curtain. It could begin with a familiar odor like iced tea, a flash of a red shirt, a sudden movement in his periphery, a flag snapping in a brisk wind, a child with blond hair, a bicycle lying on a lawn-just about anything at all. Any thought of Barney brought Ward back to the memory of clutching a small, limp body in his arms as hell closed in on him.

Barney's given name had been Ward McCarty III, but he chose the name Barney himself at the age of five because he so admired that insipid purple dinosaur. At first, Ward and Natasha humored their beautiful boy. Soon, he stopped answering to anything but his newly chosen name.

Ward often dreamed-some dreams included a cameo by his son, or, if Ward was very lucky, a starring role. Those double- edged dreams were sweet torture, leaving his soul lacerated and leaking some essential nectar. He always woke with an odd feeling of being both full and empty at the same time.

What consumed a great deal of Ward's waking hours was the thought that every decision a creature made led to a path with unknowable consequences. An animal's choice of an action-or path-might find it a mate, shelter, or food-or the possibility of becoming another animal's dinner. By the same token, some bean counter with a sharp pencil might choose to install a less expensive-not groundfault-interrupted-electrical outlet near a pool, and then not properly insulate a connection which, if the ground was saturated, could lead to the tragic death of an angelic child. Ward thought about this faceless man in some generic office day after day and saw no relief to being forever haunted by the avalanche that had begun with the simple decision of a budget- conscious drone.

Sometimes, when Ward McCarty looked at animals, he wondered if they ever dreamed alive their dead the way people did.

It was cool inside the wide- bodied craft. When Ward arrived at his assigned row, he found the center seat already occupied by a young girl with blond hair accented with bright red and blue streaks. She was plugged into an iPod. He opened the overhead compartment and managed to wedge in his carry- on.

The girl looked up at him, and when he met her green eyes, she smiled, showing small teeth accented with silver wire braces. Ward pointed to the window seat beyond her, whereupon she unplugged her earphones, got up, and moved into the aisle to let him pass, leaving her cloth tote bag on her seat.

Ward spent the first two hours alternating between watching the movie on a small screen in the ceiling over the aisle, and, out of the corner of his eye, observing the electronic activities of the girl beside him.

He figured her age as somewhere between thirteen and seventeen. Her freckled skin was clear. She wore an ebony pearl stud in her small earlobe. She was five five, and the yellow too-large- by- a-mile sweatshirt had the famous “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign screen- printed on it, which contrasted with her red shorts and blue flip- flops. He couldn't help but notice that each of the nails on her fingers and toes was painted a different color.

The black tote bag in her lap contained an assortment of electronic devices, and like a child with a short attention span she went from her iPod, to a Game Boy, to plugging a set of airline earphones into the armrest to watch the movie, then back to the iPod. And when he had decided that she was closer to seventeen than thirteen, she took out a DVD player and watched a cartoon clearly geared to very young children. She watched intently, laughing melodiously here and there as the cartoon played.

Thirty minutes out of Charlotte, he dropped his tray, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out one of the monogrammed index cards he carried to list things to do. As he lined up his thoughts, Ward began sketching a small familiar face in one corner of the card.

“Hey,” the girl said suddenly, interrupting his drawing.

As she stared down at the card on the tray, she pulled her earphones off.

“Whacha doing?” she asked.

“Thinking,” he replied.

“You're a good drawer,” she said. “Could you draw me?”

Ward studied her round face and reproduced her likeness in less than two minutes, all the while her eyes moved from his face to the drawing and back like someone watching a tennis match. Ward had the ability to sketch what he saw, and faces were what he drew best.

When he finished the sketch, she smiled. “Cool. Are you a professional artist?”

He answered, “No. I do some light designing.”

A confused look briefly took over her features. “Like what kind of lights do you design?”

“Oh,” he said, smiling. “My company makes and markets NASCAR memorabilia. Cars, hats, T-shirts, mugs, key chains.”

“No shit?” she said, too loudly. The word earned her a frown from the man beside her. “My mother is a race- car fan.”

Ward reached down, took out his briefcase, and opened it, taking out the model car to show her.

“You, what, painted it?” she asked, beaming.

“My father had it made in Japan. Nowadays they're made mostly in China. See, we take pictures of a real car from several angles and a factory makes the model from the pictures, which they produce, box, and ship to us, and we distribute them from our warehouse. We just change the art on the car depending on whose car it is, since every race team has different sponsors.”

“This is so fucking cool. Could I get one?”

“Well, not this one. This one is the first one my father had made,” he explained. “This is the prototype. He didn't have a lot of money and that car only raced one year. As it turned out, he made other models and they did sell and so he ordered more, but this one was handmade. Mostly he used it to show to bankers and investors, who weren't all that impressed. In those days NASCAR was only popular with relatively few people.”

He started to tell her why he had it with him, but didn't. What he did say was, “I can get you a new one-driver of your choice.”

“No shit?”

“Absolutely none.” He took another note card and scribbled his office number on it. “Call and ask for Leslie, and she'll send one to you for your mother. We have thousands of them in our warehouse.”

She narrowed her eyes, suspiciously. “How much will it cost?”

“My treat.”

“No shit? Thanks. That is so sick.”

“Sick?”

“Sick as in cool.”

“Who's your mother's favorite driver?”

“I dunno. I can find out.” She ran the wheels back and forth on her lap and made a motor noise as she did this. “Is this you on the card?” she asked, pointing at the card he'd given her with her inked likeness. “Ward McCarty That's you?”

“It is,” he told her.

“Why were you in Vegas?” she asked. “Gam bling?”

“No. Work. You?”

“I fly back and forth a lot,” she said. “My dad lives there and I live with my mother in Charlotte. You married?”

“Yes.”

“What's your wife do?”

“She's a pediatric surgeon,” Ward said.

“What's that mean?”

“Pediatric means children,” Ward said.

“I know that. So she like cuts little kids open?” Her eyes were wide, her mouth a circle.

“Yes, but I think it's more complicated than making cuts.”

“Y’all got any kids?”

“No,” he said.

“You're like too old?”

“I expect you're right,” he said, trying to smile. This wasn't true… as far as he knew.

When she handed the car back, Ward put the padded envelope back in his briefcase, closed it, and placed it under the seat.

“I need to slip out past you,” he told her.

“Why?” she asked.

“Visit the little boys’ room.”

After the man beside the girl unbuckled his seat belt and stood in the aisle, she tucked her feet up in her seat so Ward could get out.

After he'd finished in the tiny bathroom, Ward left the enclosure and found a man in Bermudas waiting his turn. When Ward returned to his row, the girl, who was back again listening to her iPod, smiled up at him and pulled in her feet to let him get to his seat.

When the plane landed ten minutes later and parked at the terminal, the girl grabbed up her bag of toys and was off the plane before Ward got his carry- on and filed out.

He thought about what the girl had said about him being too old to have children, and realized it wasn't true. He and Natasha hadn't talked about having another child since Barney's accident, and the thought comforted him. For the first time in a very long time, Ward McCarty felt a degree of optimism about the future.